Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

  One night, we all went out on the town, and walked back to my grandmother’s just before dawn. Hugging Teto and me, Papá said:

  “Ay, my boys. We really have drunk ourselves sober.”

  I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kiss him on the lips.

  We met again in 1999. I’d seduced my secretary’s daughter. Her mother found out and told the girl to stop seeing me. Ana Sol ran away from home with a small suitcase and came to live in my attic. I got depressed: Lupita (my ex-mother-in-law shares my mamá’s name) had been more than good to me, and I’d betrayed her. She knew about my cocaine addiction, which made things worse. I felt I was in love, but also poisoned by confusion and guilt.

  I don’t know why I rang him. I explained the situation, without omitting the smallest detail. For once in his life, my father behaved like a father.

  “You need to kick the drugs and take a step back, son. Bring your woman here to Cancún. I’ll cover it.”

  Ana Sol and I arrived at my papá’s house three days before Teto. What I didn’t know was that Gilberto Membreño was taking his leave of the Maya Riviera, where he’d spent the nineties. He’d just married Marta (who was then, like me, twenty-eight) and they were planning to settle down together in Mexico City, where they would open a travel agency.

  The day after our arrival, the new owner of Gilberto’s house came to collect the keys. Everything was already packed up. Marta, Papá, Ana Sol, and I moved into the Fiesta Americana, where he’d managed to get courtesy rooms. Teto met up with us there. After that, always for free thanks to his industry contacts, we spent nights in other hotels: Caesar’s Park, the Meliá Turquesa, the Meliá Cancún … We continued this haphazard existence until the night a new plan emerged: rather than putting Papá’s cars on the back of a trailer bound for the capital, and then making the journey by plane ourselves, we decided to go the whole way overland, driving both cars, stopping wherever an industry acquaintance could give us free lodging. The cars were a red Ford Fairmont dating from the eighties, and the beautifully maintained white 1965 Mustang Señor Membreño had named Prince.

  The initial idea was for Teto and me to do the driving: that way my father could drink at his leisure. I explained I couldn’t drive. He was shocked. In the end, Ana Sol and Teto took turns at the wheel of the Fairmont, and Marta and Gilberto drove the Mustang. For a few days, Ana Sol had a crush on my younger brother: she realized she’d gotten the short straw when she ended up with the stocky, ugly old kid of the family. It passed.

  We stopped in Mérida, Telchac, and Campeche. In Villahermosa, the Fairmont packed up for four days: days during which we relieved the boredom with free drinks from the mini-bar. We made a brief halt in Veracruz. Finally, after nine days on the road, we got to my grandmother’s house in Atlixco, where we said our good-byes. The whole way, Gilberto Membreño was a patient, understanding, affectionate father. In my grandmother’s house, he took me to her bedroom (no man was allowed to enter that room) and showed me a picture hanging over the dressing table: a horrible portrait of me that seemed to have been air-brushed. My hair is long and I’m wearing a white shirt with the number seven on the chest. It was dated 1974.

  I didn’t tell him (this is the first time I’ve acknowledged it), but I decided right then never to see him again. Why ruin such a perfect memory, such a sweet journey?

  I returned to Saltillo. I stopped doing cocaine. I married Ana Sol. We got divorced. I started doing cocaine again. I lived with Anabel. Then with Lauréline. I tried to kill myself. I met Mónica. We had a son. My mother died. More than ten years went by.

  Seven months after the death of Guadalupe Chávez, I received an invitation to a literary conference in Acapulco. I hesitated: Could I battle so soon with the ghost of Marisela Acosta walking the streets of that city where she’d been so happy, a ghost wearing an obscene pair of shorts that covered only half her ass? It had been twenty years since I’d set foot in the port in which I was born.

  I accepted the invitation.

  I knew, from sporadic telephone messages, that my father’s business had gone bust, he’d divorced Marta, and had, for some years, been living with Teto. I asked myself whether it might be a good idea to call and invite them to dinner. And I answered: “Tomorrow” (only to answer the same the next day).

  They put me up in an old, very lovely hotel with a view of La Quebrada. As soon as I arrived (it would have been four or five in the afternoon), I bumped into Marcelo Uribe and Christopher Domínguez in the lobby. They appeared to have agreed to blend into the architecture and decor of their surroundings: Marcelo was wearing a panama hat and Christopher a dark-gray Stetson. I checked in, left my suitcase in my room, and went down to the outdoor restaurant. There were too many writers: Jorge Esquinca, Luis Armenta, Ernesto Lumbreras, Citla Guerrero, Jere Marquines, Hernán Bravo Varela, Alan Mills, Tere Avedoy, and perhaps fifty more I can’t remember now. The atmosphere was oppressive. A few hours later, there was a rainstorm. The torches of the divers throwing themselves from the rocks went out long before falling into the choppy sea.

  One curious incident occurred: I was introduced to Mario Bellatin, and when we touched, a thunderclap sounded from very close by. Mario smiled and, hugging me, said:

  “Settled, right?”

  I was vain enough to believe he was referring to a literary bond between us. I now know that Mario Bellatin is an incarnation of Mephistopheles, and was simply giving me advance warning of the telephone call I was about to receive.

  At midnight, I invited Alan Mills and a few of the youngest guys to my room to continue drinking. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. It was Mónica.

  “Oh, Julián … You’re not going to believe this.”

  “What?”

  “I hate to have to …”

  “What?”

  “Your brother Teto called. Your father’s dead. He had a massive heart attack.”

  I asked my friends to leave me alone for a while. I didn’t know what to do. After all, I’d secretly buried my old man ten years before. A muffled inner voice (the voice of the cynical, abusive, Hartista son of a bitch that I am) said: “This is good material for the ending of your novel.” I cursed Paul Auster and his poetic feeling for chance.

  Mónica says that before ringing off, I repeated the same phrase several times:

  “I’m an orphan.”

  I believe I was referring to an anguish springing from a biological fact, not any form of spiritual sorrow. But anguish is the only true emotion.

  I plucked up my courage and called Teto’s cell phone. He must have been surprised when he saw the area code because he asked:

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  The funeral service was to be the following day: Papá had gone to Atlixco to visit my grandmother, and that’s where the heart attack struck him down. When we spoke, Teto was on the road, on his way to collect the body. We agreed to talk again in the morning. I offered him my condolences and hung up.

  The truly tragic aspect of all this was struggling with my affection for my father: there were too many writers at that literary conference. By breakfast, they’d all heard of my misfortune. I fulfilled my duties: in the morning I went to the conference room and delivered my lecture. The rest of the time, I was pretty much in hiding. Even so, more condolences were aimed at me than my body could bear: knife blows to the liver. Poor people. How were they to know …? I spent the whole afternoon throwing up.

  At midday, I telephoned Teto’s wife. She gave me the address of the funeral parlor. The show would begin at five. I put off my departure until ten that night and, in the interim, watched a couple of movies and went out onto the balcony of my room to view the spectacle of La Quebrada: half-naked scrawneeblies throwing themselves, one after the other, headfirst onto the rocks. Acapulco should be designated a federal crime.

  I finally left the hotel. Got in a cab. Gave the driver the address of the funeral parlor. It wasn’t far: on Cuauht�
�moc, just before the junction with what had once for me been the canal street and is now a wide avenue with several underpasses. The glass door wasn’t very wide. The street—like all streets in Acapulco—was filled with trash. There were two chapels inside the establishment. I immediately knew which was my father’s: I recognized Teto, in suit and tie, squatting down, his head and hands resting in the lap of an older seated woman who must have been Señora Abarca: his mother. A woman in her thirties was stroking my brother’s hair. I don’t know if she was his wife or my half sister Betty: I’d never met either of them. There were enough mourners for me to pass unnoticed by the door for a minute. As long as was needed to mentally repeat the question that had been eating away at me since I was twelve: Which of us was the ghost, my father or me …?

  The funeral scene said it all. Without either greeting or saying farewell to Gilberto’s body, I turned and walked away from the home of the Membreño Abarcas, a mansion I had held under a spell for almost forty years.

  There’s an orchard next to my house: twenty-two acres of walnut, apple, quince, privet, and poplar trees. Leonardo and I go there every day. Sometimes for a couple of hours. Sometimes only for a minute or two. It depends on him. If he’s in the mood, we walk to the small tumbledown house, turn toward El Morillo, cut through the old carpentry workshop to say hello to the cows, go down and up the banks of the gully, give an apple to Hernán’s horse, and stop for a while at the large yellow door at the back to wait for a train to pass. If he isn’t in the mood, we sit among the dry leaves at the entrance to Martha’s house and eat ants.

  Whenever we’re there, I think of Marisela Acosta: I can’t escape the fact that the most famous brothel she worked in was called La Huerta, The Orchard.

  “Lobo y Melón used to play here,” she once told me.

  I’ve never experienced anything as exhausting as paternity. By eight in the evening I barely have the strength to drag myself to bed. What wears me out most isn’t the work in itself, but the neurotic urge to imagine each and every thing my child is feeling and thinking.

  Yesterday, while we were waiting by the large yellow door for the train to pass, I remembered the time Marisela and I were walking along the Coyuca Sand Bar. She was singing, from the depths of that dark night of language that is ignorance, a schmaltzy Spanish song: so you never forget me, not even for a moment, and we two live together in memories, so you never forget me. I’m a cynical, orphan ex-son of a whore who’s read Saint John of the Cross: I know that the “tribe” won’t give me words any purer than those unexceptional ones by Lorenzo Santamaría to explain to Leonardo, before I die, what it meant to me to eat ants by his side.

  The death of Guadalupe Chávez and Marisela Acosta was a fast-forward version of her life.

  In the first place, obstinacy: her death throes lasted from dawn to eleven at night.

  Second, the comedy of errors: it took them eight hours to release her body because, when she was first admitted to the University Hospital a year before, someone had recorded her personal details incorrectly: they had rechristened her Guadalupe “Charles.” A perfectly normal occurrence for my family. They had to make out the death certificate twice. What better homage could Mexican bureaucracy pay to a fugitive from her own name?

  Third, the insult, the snide humor of violence. The man from the funeral parlor couldn’t get the corpse into his hearse because there was a difference in height between the fender of his vehicle and the stretcher. He tried several times, pushing with all his might as if he were in a bumper car. The stretcher bounced against the fender, and the body of my defunct mother, wrapped from head to toe in a dirty sheet, wobbled like Jell-O. I felt a mixture of indignation, embarrassment for the man, and the desire to giggle. He, for his part, was ashamed and furious. I remembered something I’d once been told: “People have a word of honor; wild beasts don’t.” Finally, Saíd and I took pity on the contrite driver and helped him to load the bundle.

  We didn’t go in for any ceremony: we had her cremated, and that was that. For many years, since Jorge left home, I’d been given precise instructions.

  “Here, Cachito,” she said, drunk on rum and shame, going into the underground parking lot of a funeral parlor. “You bring me here and you burn me. Swear it.”

  “I swear, but let’s go. Someone’s going to complain.”

  “Swear it, Cachito. Don’t let them bury me or make a big fuss. Quietly, without telling anyone, you come and you burn me.”

  At noon the ashes were handed over to us in a rectangular urn of fake pink marble.

  Each one of us dealt with it in our own way. In Yokohama, Jorge set out walking in a straight line and didn’t stop until the sea got in his way. Diana, who had shared the house with Guadalupe, had to take refuge in a hotel. Saíd, on the other hand, seemed illuminated by pain; I never saw him so somber.

  What was delicious during those first days of mourning was the exact instant of waking: when it still hadn’t dawned on me that my mother was dead, and I could enjoy the absence of the unrelieved anguish her suffering caused me for a year. But almost immediately, unhealthy lucidity would emerge: there is nothing more sinister than light.

  And then Leonardo was born. Every abyss has its lullabies.

  I don’t remember when I saw her on her feet for the last time. I guess it was at the door to her house. She always used to accompany you to the door. It wasn’t a matter of being polite, she was just garrulous: she talked nonstop. It was impossible to shut her up. You had to begin saying good-bye at least half an hour before you wanted to leave. In her own defense, she’d counter:

  “It’s your fault, you never come around. There’s a lot to tell you.”

  The truth is she used to repeat the same thing eighty times. My whole life, I’ve detested the fact that she talked so much. Yet what made me hit the floor when the doctor came to inform me she’d finally died was the simple revelation that I’d never hear her voice again.

  During the last week, we phoned each other every day: she wanted to be up-to-the-minute on everything happening around the birth. On September 9, at night, I heard a hacking cough on the other end of the line.

  “Let’s see the doctor.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But we’ll wait until morning. I’ve got an appointment for a checkup anyway.”

  Diana called at three in the morning to tell me they were leaving for the ER. Mónica and I met her there. Just before dawn, Saíd and Norma arrived too.

  She was admitted into intensive care. Her platelets were rock bottom and the fluid on her lungs, which had never been drained, was threatening to block her respiratory tract. It was no one’s fault. She was simply broken: a year of virus and venom is too much for an organism whose only empire has been to assimilate every variety of blows.

  At midday, they confirmed she did not have long to live.

  “I suggest you say your good-byes,” said Valencia. “It’s a matter of hours.”

  My brother and sisters took it in turns to visit with her.

  “Go home,” I said when they had finished. “I’ll let you know.”

  That was my role.

  I waited until they all, including Mónica, had left the hospital. I needed to be alone: I couldn’t have borne for anyone to touch me after going in to see her.

  I went into intensive care. The nurse pointed to a cubicle on the left. I drew back the curtain. She was connected to more weaponry and little lights than ever. A transparent plastic mask covered her mouth and nose. She could no longer see.

  There was nothing to say: we’d had a whole year of lucid pain.

  In case you have any doubts, I did say it. I said:

  “I love you. I’m my mother’s son.”

  She was just about able to squeeze my hand. It was a squeeze of gratitude, without resignation, without pardon, without forgetting: merely a perfect reflection of panic. That was the last brick of education Guadalupe Chávez left to me. The most important of all.

  Saltillo University Ho
spital,

  October 2008 / Lamadrid, Coahuila, March 2011

  Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of several poetry collections, a novel, and a story collection, as well as a book of reportage. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.

  Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. She has published translations of two other books by the same author, and her translation of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel Among Strange Victims was shortlisted for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She has also published translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms and contributed to the anthologies México20; Lunatics, Lovers & Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare; and Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela.

  The text of Tomb Song is set in Chaparral Pro. Created by type designer Carol Twombly, Chaparral is named for the drought-resistant shrubland on the arid coastal range near Twombly’s California home. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.